Vouchers

The City School District of the City of New York is the largest school system in the United States, with over 1.1 million students taught in more than 1,800 separate schools. The department covers all five boroughs of New York City and has an annual budget of nearly $25 billion.

New York City’s “public” schools offer many parents a choice among providers – if their child happens to be gifted as measured by scores on a test.

The five most elite of the “choosable” schools require a score in the 99th percentile for admission. According to the New York Times (Oct. 11, 2019), “ … [D]ozens of other gifted programs … throughout the city generally require students to score in the 90th percentile.”

Parents of smart kids – and they alone – enjoy what amounts to a voucher. Their choices, it is claimed, can in many lower-income neighborhoods, intensify the racial segregation of those local schools as they are abandoned by the more brainy; or so we learn from the Times.

Any unnecessarily segregated system will be disfavored by many of the public, including those, like myself, who marched in Selma, authored several federal reports on segregation in Chicago and Evanston public schools and served on President Jimmy Carter’s National Panel on Education – and would do it all again.

If New York’s very selective system of parental choice effectively segregated by race, it seems imperative to ask whether this is the only way to respect and preserve the very real value of high intellectual aspiration. Are integration and quality incompatible?

For critical consideration by the professional educator or critic, I cite the half-dozen model statutes and popular initiatives published over three-plus decades by Stephen D. Sugarman and myself. For the curious but busy, it may be more convenient to stick with our explanatory addendum or “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control” (1978). I regret that this sounds vain; blame it on my age and the despair of watching the city schools and their hapless victims.

Somehow, this society must find ways of protecting the moral, intellectual and stylistic integrity of participating schools while treating both racial and economic integration of families as equally important and compatible with parental authority, which for this observer is paramount. Devices to serve all these values will, of course, require some compromise.

For example:

The school could be free to fill 75 percent of its seats as it prefers; the balance would be selected by lottery among unchosen applicants.

The schools must provide basic information about itself in a public manner.

If the school is private or charter (the teacher unions insist that charter schools are private schools; I agree) it could teach religion to all pupils but could not require an unbeliever to assent or participate in ceremony.

The school could enforce a minimum standard of learning by dismissal (with hearing). Ditto for behavior.

As for tuition imposed by the school above the value of the governmental support for the parent, there are various approaches. One is simply to disallow it for low-income parents, permitting graduated add-ons for those above. Of course, the basic grant should match, or at least approach, an amount sufficient to sustain a “common” school.

Enough. Let the union rise in horror. There is nothing in all we have written that would discourage the formation of strong teacher unions of the sort common to the private sector. There is everything to be said for tough teacher organization that can insist upon a fair share of the good stuff, always aware that, if they get too greedy, their own jobs will cease to exist.

Editor’s note: The data in this post are accurate as of 5:06 p.m. Monday, Nov. 11, 2019.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran announced recently that the state’s new Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) program, enacted with bipartisan support, reached its 18,000-student enrollment cap only three months after becoming law. No education choice program in the country has ever grown this large this fast.

The average income for a family of four on the FES program is $28,252.65. These are low-income families fighting to give their children a chance at a better life.

The number of low-income Florida families trying to access more education choices through our nonprofit, Step Up For Students(which hosts this blog), is accelerating. Last year, 170,471 low-income students started applications in our system before we turned it off. This year, 198,030 students started applications.

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) has served 31,225 new students this year compared to 18,806 last year. The FTC and FES programs together have served 125,184 new and renewal students this year compared to 98,802 FTC students last year.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the funds to provide scholarships to every qualified student. We have 35,825 students who have been found eligible for FTC and/or FES scholarships but do not currently have a scholarship award because of insufficient funds.

The Gardiner Scholarship program for children with unique abilities/special needs is the third scholarship program SUFS manages in which demand far exceeds supply. With strong bi-partisan support, lawmakers gratefully funded 1,900 new Gardiner students this year. But demand is so high that by January we’ll have about 3,200 additional eligible Gardiner students who do not have scholarships because of insufficient funds.

A side benefit of more families having greater control over how their public education dollars are spent is small business development, especially in under-served urban communities. As enrollment in our five scholarship programs continues to increase, and as families are able to spend their scholarship funds on a greater variety of educational products and services, the number of small and medium-sized businesses benefiting is also increasing.

Over the last few years our scholarship families have purchased products and services from over 10,000 providers, including schools, tutors, occupational therapists, counselors, educational hardware and software companies, physical therapists, curriculum providers, and book stores.

Hopefully, when the Florida Legislature convenes in January, there will again be bipartisan support for more families having greater control over how their low-income and unique abilities children are educated. No child’s future should be put on a waiting list.

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit a September 2015 interview with a voucher advocate who has fought for the educational rights of disabled and low-income students.

Marcus Brandon’s resume starts off like a progressive’s dream.

National finance director, Dennis Kucinich for president. Staffer, Progressive Majority. Deputy director, Equality Virginia. But once it rolls into Brandon’s education accomplishments, some fellow progressives get whiplash. During two terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives, Brandon was a leading force behind bills that created vouchers for disabled and low-income students, and removed the state’s cap on charter schools.

Inconsistency? Not for Brandon, a rising political star whose family’s civil rights bona fides are unquestioned.

“I tell people that my views on education are the most progressive stance that I have,” Brandon told redefinED. “Progressives have to take a real hard look at the way they view education because I’ve always been brought up, in the civil rights movement and all of that, (to) fight for equal opportunity and equal access for everybody.”

Brandon, who now directs the Carolina CAN education advocacy group, isn’t an anomaly. A growing list of influential liberals, progressives and Democrats are increasingly supportive of school choice. In the process, they’re wrenching the left back into alignment with its own forgotten history – a history that is especially rich in the African-American experience.

Milton Friedman would merit a few paragraphs in a book on this subject. But there’d be whole chapters devoted to the educational endeavors of freed slaves and black churches. To Mississippi freedom schools and Marva Collins. To the connections between Brown v. Board of Education and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.

“School choice is not new for African-Americans,” said Brandon, whose family played a role in the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., which toppled segregationist dominos nationwide. “It is very much a part of our history for the community to be involved with the school. It’s very much a part of our history for the churches to start their own school. That is just as deep in our history as any part of our history. … It mind-boggles me that the people who are fighting this will forget that.”

Better yet, they should pause and consider the pleas of black parents.

In the meantime, they should hear out one of their own. (A podcast with Brandon is included below.)

Brandon’s support for vouchers and charter schools led fellow progressives to threaten to run him out of office, and worse. (Those kinds of attacks on black choice supporters aren’t an anomaly either.

Consider hit pieces like this one. And headlines like this.) What they should have done instead, he suggested, was consider choice on its merits – and the hypocrisy of many choice critics.

“You get a lot of harsh rhetoric from progressives … who would never send their child to my school one day of the week. That’s why I have a problem with that,” Brandon said. “They’re like, ‘Keep your kids there, keep your kids there.’ But at the end of the day they would never send their kids to my school.

“I remember being in a parade one time, and one progressive yelled at me, ‘You’re privatizing schools.’ And I asked her, ‘Would you send your kid to my school?’ And every time I ask that question the conversation gets very silent. And so what African-Americans need to do is understand that. Our leaders need to understand that those that are leading this fight (against school choice) do not send their kids to our school. And so what are we going to do?”

It’s not progressive, he said, to keep looking the other away.

“We’ve allowed these educational outcomes and these policies to go on for 40, 50 years, and then we say we’re going to continue that and someone says that’s progressive,” Brandon said. “If you have data that shows consistently that there is one particular segment of the population that doesn’t do well under a system, well that’s not progressive.”

Howard Fuller, founder and director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning, served as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and became nationally known for his support of fundamental education reform.

Each Saturday in November, redefinED is reprising a podcast from our archives, reminding readers that we have a wealth of audio content to complement our written blog posts. Today, we revisit an August 2015 interview with civil rights activist, education reform advocate and academic Howard Fuller.

Because most places have fewer school options than parents want, and private school choice programs have usually targeted disadvantaged students in some way, similar left-right coalitions have formed all over the country.

Howard Fuller sits squarely in the social justice camp. When other private school choice supporters try to make eligibility universal, he often objects, on behalf of disadvantaged students he fears will be short-changed and in support of principles staked out by the late Polly Williams and others who helped create the Milwaukee voucher program.

“The only way we could have avoided that would have been to say we’re not going to have parent choice for low-income people, because you couldn’t get to where we got to without pulling together the type of coalition that was pulled together,” he says.

Fuller says it can make sense to offer scholarships to some families higher on the income scale, especially if funding levels are “graduated” so they receive smaller amounts. That can help build a stronger base of political support. However, he says, there should still be a cut-off at some point, so school choice programs aren’t subsidizing private-school tuition for the wealthy.

He acknowledges some of the points Ladner and others have made. Even the wealthiest families, he says, have access to public schools, which sometimes are walled off in exclusive enclaves inaccessible to low-income families. That said, Fuller notes state laws tend to treat public and private schools differently.

“Maybe what’s happening is, the generation behind me (in the school choice movement) doesn’t make those same distinctions that I’m making,” he says.

Ultimately, Fuller says, he’s trying to raise a deeper issue. Private school choice programs should aim to be social equalizers. It’s the poor who are most short-changed by the existing education system, and who often lack the political power to fix that inequity.

“I’m always looking at the fact that no matter how we try to skim over it, talk about it, intellectualize it, or whatever, the system is set up to favor people who have more resources,” he says. “… If we do not fight to make sure that there are programs out here that give poor people a leg up, give them some more opportunity — if we don’t fight for that, it’s not going to happen.”

Father Knows Best, an American sitcom starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt, chronicled the lives of the Andersons, a middle-class family living in the Midwest in the 1950s.

Conservatives have been accused of wanting to take the nation back to an idealized version of a homogenized America, such as the ones portrayed in the squeaky-clean 1950s sitcoms “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father Knows Best,” before the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. (Sometimesthey’re right.) Critics point out that wasn’t the reality, nor ideal, for many Americans, particularly those who were excluded from many sectors of society because of their race, sex, or sexual orientation.

Many who defend public education against private-school vouchers are guilty of a similarly misplaced nostalgia.

In a recent Scotusblog symposium on the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, Alice O’Brien, general counsel at the National Education Association, took Montana’s side in the dispute over whether its constitution can prohibit public funds being directed to private religious schools via parental choice.

She writes that most state constitutional education provisions reflect “common understandings” that include “a uniform quality system of public education is essential to democratic self-governance,” and “entangling the state in funding religious education leads to sectarian conflict.”

This history is true given the fact that many of these provisions have their roots in the 19th century, when Horace Mann led the common school movement, followed by John Dewey in the early 20th century. Making a free education available to the entire public, regardless of a student’s class, gender, religion, ethnicity, or country of origin, was seen as a great social equalizer and assimilator, as well as a way to impart shared civic values on the citizenry, making for a stronger, stable democracy.

David Labaree, professor at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, has called public education “an institution that for much of our history helped bring us together into a community of citizens.”

Today that approach appears as quaint as “Little House on the Prairie.” Not that the old days of public education were kumbaya either. Just ask black students who were forced to attend segregated schools.

Common schools and uniform systems of public education require shared beliefs among their stakeholders. Look around the nation’s political and cultural landscape. Do you see a lot of communality?

O’Brien worries about vouchers sparking sectarian conflict (ironic, given the fact that Montana’s education provision is a de facto Blaine Amendment, itself a product of anti-Catholic bigotry) when schools already are riven by the secular conflicts of the culture wars.

Into this bubbling cauldron we’re going to impose a uniform system of schooling that inculcates civic values.

Whose values?

These clashes in part reflect changing mores, but also the atomization of American culture and the customization of individual lifestyles. The old gatekeepers have fallen and the doors flung open to a myriad of choices for the populace. Personal technology facilitates people choosing what they want to consume (be it entertainment, information, food, or virtually any product), when and where they want to consume it. They can select exactly what aligns with their tastes and their daily schedules.

These modern citizens are not going to subject themselves to a one-size-fits-all education. They expect to get what they want, and demand the same freedom of choice in other aspects of their lives.

Believing that centralized education delivery systems can meet all these desires is as misguided and unrealistic as thinking what America needs is more Ward and June Cleavers.

The ones most satisfied with public education will be the ones setting the agenda. Replacing those in power making the “wrong” decisions with those who will exercise the “right” judgment only trades one perceived oppressor for the other, leaving the minority chafing at the majority’s new rules imposed on them. The disputes may change, but the frictions remain. Worse, when policy becomes a zero-sum calculation, these back-and-forth battles elevate the stakes of elections, which intensifies political strife. Rinse and repeat.

The relief valve for this pressure cooker is to give more families a diverse array of education options and the freedom to choose the ones that best align with their children’s needs and their values. Access cannot be income dependent. That’s why vouchers, scholarships and other assistance are necessary to provide equal opportunity.

That approach still promotes the ideal of public investment in education for all, without limiting it to a single delivery system – one that is ill-suited to accommodate the competing wants and needs of its diverse clientele in a modern world (if it ever truly was).

There’s no going back. Nostalgia should not be an excuse to deny giving more parents more choices in their children’s education. Education should reflect the way the world is, not the way people want it to be.

For a variety of reasons, neither political party expressed much interest in public funding for private schools until the 1960s and 70s.

Editor’s note: Each Saturday in October, redefinED is reviving a post from our archives that speaks to the rich and sometimes surprising history of education choice in the United States. Today’s post, which first appeared in October 2012, reflects upon the complex and often conflicting political, economic and social forces that have caused both Republicans and Democrats to struggle with the issue of public funding for private education choice.

Long-time Democratic education activist Jack Jennings, in a recent Huffington Postcolumn, argued that Republican support for private school choice is a somewhat recent (i.e., the last 45 years) phenomenon, driven by a political desire to appeal to segregationists and weaken teacher unions. Jennings writes, “The Republicans’ talk about giving parents the right to choose is a politically expedient strategy … Just beneath the surface of the education rhetoric are political motivations to thwart integration, weaken the Democratic coalition, and cripple the teachers’ unions.”

Jennings is being disingenuous by not acknowledging that Democrats have also changed their position on public funding for private school choice over the years. Democrats George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey both ran for president on platforms supporting tuition tax credits for private schools, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was the U.S. Senate’s leading advocate for giving parents public funding to attend private schools. The Democratic Party reversed its support of public funding for private school choice in the late 1970s – as a political payback to the National Education Association for giving Jimmy Carter its first ever presidential endorsement.

Jennings’ assertion that Republican support for publicly-funded private school choice didn’t exist prior to the 1960s would be news to the founders of the Republican Party, most notably William Henry Seward. Seward (pictured here) helped create the Republican Party and was one of Abraham Lincoln’s primary rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. After losing, Seward served as Lincoln’s Secretary of State during the Civil War.

Prior to seeking the presidency, Seward was elected governor of New York in 1838 as a member of the Whig Party. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, in his 1839 New Year’s Day inaugural address, Seward attempted to broaden his party’s political base by reaching out to “the Irish and German Catholic immigrants who formed the backbone of the state Democratic Party” (p. 82). As part of what Goodwin describes as Seward’s “progressive policies on education and immigration,” Seward “proposed to reform the school system, where the virulently anti-Catholic curriculum frightened immigrants away, dooming vast numbers to illiteracy, poverty, and vice. To get these children off the streets and provide them with opportunities to advance, Seward hoped to divert some part of the public school funds to support parochial schools where children could receive instruction from members of their own faith” (p. 83).

Seward’s attempts to give Catholic children access to more appropriate learning options drew a sharp rebuke from anti-Catholic Protestants. They accused him of tearing down the wall between church and state. At this time in U.S. history, the word “church” in the phrase separation of church and state meant the Catholic Church.

An eclectic array of political forces came together to found the Republican Party, including anti-slavery Whigs, Democrats, newly arrived immigrants and Know Nothings. The Know Nothings were an anti-immigrant party that did well in Massachusetts state elections in 1850 and helped pass the nation’s first mandatory school attend law in 1852. It was designed to push Catholic students into Protestant public schools, where they were required to read the Protestant King James Bible. While the immigrants within the new Republican Party were supportive of Seward’s position, the Know Nothings and other native Protestants were adamantly opposed, so a political stalemate ensued until the last year of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency.

In 1875, President Grant, a Republican, decided to use the rapid expansion of Catholic immigration and Catholic schools as a political issue to help his preferred successor, James Blaine of Maine, win the 1876 presidential election. Catholic immigrants in urban areas had become a core constituency of the Democratic Party. Catholic schools were expanding rapidly and, in many states, receiving public funds to educate the poor. Sensing a political opportunity, Grant proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing public funding for religious schools, knowing this would strengthen Protestant support for the Republican Party and Blaine’s candidacy. This amendment failed to pass the Senate and Blaine’s candidacy got derailed by an alleged bribery scandal. But eventually, 33 states did add similar amendments to their state constitutions, which today are known as Blaine Amendments.

Widespread anti-Catholic hostility continued well into the 20th Century and didn’t end politically until John F. Kennedy’s presidential election in 1960. Consequently, both political parties expressed little interest in public funding for private schools until the 1960s and 70s. Jennings claims Republicans changed their position to help whites avoid attending integrated schools, and this certainly explains why some Republicans embraced school choice in the 1960s. But many Democrats also did so at this time for the same reason. In the 1960s, opposition to school integration at the local and state levels was bi-partisan.

Strangely, Jennings ignores the influence Milton Friedman had on the Republican Party’s current position on school choice. Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics, was an advisor to President Reagan and is widely regarded as one of the most influential economist in the 20th Century. He spent more than 50 years promoting free markets in public education, and introduced the concept of vouchers into public education. Few Republicans would disagree that Friedman’s work is the intellectual basis of the party’s current position on public funding for private school choice.

Conflicting political, economic and social forces have caused both political parties to struggle with the issue of public funding for private school choice over the last 150 years. To suggest otherwise is a misread of history.

Writer’s Note: The Team of Rivals quotations come from the 2006 Simon & Schuster paperback version.

Julian Cruz, pictured here with his mother, Emily, was one of the first students to receive a Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs. The direct-state-funded scholarship now serves nearly 12,000 students.

Editor’s note: We add a new feature today, called fact-checkED, that is inspired by the many factchecking efforts across the media landscape these days. Our work will focus solely within the arena of educational choice, and our goal is to bring clinical precision to issues that are often complex and misunderstood. Our intent is not to shame but to inform.

In an editorial Sunday criticizing 19 “bad bills” that became state law this year, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote the following of a new school voucher called Family Empowerment Scholarships:

“Tuition vouchers (SB 7070). For the first time, money goes straight from (the) state treasury – not just by tax credits.”

This is false.

We begin by first acknowledging that the sentence above ends with a phrase describing the money as going “to unregulated private schools, most of which will be religious and can cherry-pick their students.” That’s a handful in itself, particularly given that the participating private schools are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations and that annual state evaluations of a similar program, called the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, have concluded it draws some of the state’s poorest and lowest-performing students from public schools.

But our focus here is on the claim that the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) is the first school voucher to draw funds directly from the state treasury. That’s in part because the claim has current legal and political salience. Ron Meyer, attorney for the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, has told reporters he plans to file a lawsuit asking courts to declare the new program unconstitutional. Even before the bill was passed, Meyer told the GateHouse Capital Bureau: “This could lead to the dismantling of the public school system as we’ve known it.” In June, a month after the bill was signed into law, he told the Florida Phoenix: “There is going to be a challenge.”

The Sun Sentinel editorial draws a proper contrast between the new FES program and an existing 18-year-old program called the Tax Credit Scholarship. Both serve disadvantaged students from low-income and working-class households, but the Tax Credit Scholarship is fueled by contributions from corporations. In turn, those contributions receive 100 percent credits against six different state taxes. Last year, the Tax Credit Scholarship served 104,091 low-income students at a cost of roughly $644.7 million. The funding distinction is important, and led in part to the 2017 dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Tax Credit program.

As the editorial notes, FES is funded directly by the state. In fact, it is funded directly out of the operational funding formula, known as the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP), that pays for district public schools. One distinct difference between FES and district schools is that the scholarships receive money only through state general revenue dollars and do not receive any local property tax money (see subsection (11)(e) in the law).

The claim of being first, though, is wrong. FES is neither the first nor the only state-funded education voucher in the PreK-12 arena. It’s not even the only voucher funded directly through the FEFP. Here are the others:

The McKay Scholarship for students with learning disabilities. It was created two decades ago and last year served 30,695 students at a cost of $219.7 million. The students are tracked inside the FEFP from each school district in which they live, as is exhibited in this FEFP calculation sheet from 2018-19 (note the second column, which subtracts McKay dollars from each district). 1819 FEFP 3rdCalc

Emmy award-winner Uzo Aduba stars as Virginia Walden Ford, a champion for the education choice movement who was instrumental in creation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, in the movie Miss Virginia.

The most rewarding aspect of working in the family empowerment movement, hands down, is the people you meet. One of my all-time favorites is Virginia Walden Ford.

Virginia Walden Ford

Walden Ford grew up in Little Rock, Ark., during the battle for school integration. Decades later, she led the fight for the Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington, D.C. Now, her story has been made into a movie released by the Moving Picture Institute.

Commenting on the film Miss Virginia, EdChoice founder and CEO Robert Enlow noted that “In today’s cynical political world, Virginia’s story is a reminder that one person – one motivated mom who knew the system was rigged against her – can change the course of history.”

Rigged indeed!

The District of Columbia public education system that Walden Ford encountered as a parent in the 1990s was entirely rigged against the poor. The well-to-do in Washington, D.C., either paid for private school tuition out of their own pockets or were well-ensconced on islands of privilege in a very high-spending but tragically dysfunctional district. The striving professional class tended to bail out either to Maryland or Virginia.

Washington, D.C., NAEP scores of that era indicate that any learning taking place in public schools was accidental. If you think that statement harsh, consider the fact that a dismal 7 percent of black D.C. fourth-graders scored proficient in reading. If someone had set out to purposely create a school system to advantage the advantaged and keep the poor down, spending an absurd amount of money in the process, the protype was cast in the form of D.C.-area schools circa the end of the 20th century.

Walden Ford led the grassroots fight to provide expanded opportunities for D.C.’s low-income children, ultimately triumphing with passage of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2003. Participants in that program, by the way, demonstrated a 20 percent higher graduation rate despite only receiving a fraction of the per-pupil spending in DCPS.

Imagine what those students could do if they received their fair share of funding and the chance to spend it on tutoring and enrichment programs in addition to – or instead of – private school tuition.

Standing on the shoulders of a giant, the next generation of opportunity warriors should follow Walden Ford’s example and challenge a continually distracted Congress to pay attention to what still is a crisis for poor children in Washington, D.C. A modernized D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program could provide still greater chances for D.C. families to improve their prospects.

You will never meet a more genuine, passionate and down-to-earth advocate than Walden Ford. I’m eager to see the extent to which the filmmakers have done justice to her story.